José Ferreira, Director-Publisher

Toronto, February 16th, 2011

Dear Friends,

After ten years online, it is truly gratifying to see that the Adiaspora.com project continues to be very popular among Luso users of the Internet. At this very moment, as I write these lines, the Adiaspora.com website counter displays approximately 13.800.000 hits. This signifies that our more than twelve thousand pages of virtual content continue to be relevant and pertinent among the peoples of the Lusitanian Diaspora. Always striving to serve more and better, the Adiaspora.com team now prepares to face a new and exciting chapter in the history of our website with the inclusion of other parts of the world, namely Europe and Africa, in our content. In so doing, it is expected that the Adiaspora.com project will, in a progressive and sustainable manner, become increasingly more universal.

Throughout the ages, history has demonstrated that, among their many virtues, the Lusitanian people possess an uncanny ability to mobilize their creativity through improvisation in hard times and difficult situations. This phenomenon, unique to our people, is manifest individually or collectively in the way we overcome the many complex existential challenges we face in our everyday lives.

The socio-cultural and economic scenarios, brought about by the current global conjuncture, require that the Portuguese Diaspora draw from this common creative source to overcome the challenges we are confronted with nowadays. To do so, it is essential we harness this collective talent sensibly and judiciously. By conjugating it with sustainable development policies and strategies based on reinvention and innovation, we may then endeavour to consolidate the presence of the Portuguese in the world on all fronts in these less propitious times. And it is precisely on reinvention and innovation that this new phase of the Adiaspora.com project is rooted, with plans afoot to expand in the very near future into the field of publishing with the launching of Adiaspora Publications, as well as organizing events with view to promoting trade and commercial exchange between the Portuguese Communities and the mother-land, Portugal.

In recent years, we have chosen to celebrate the anniversaries of our website in other Portuguese Communities and in Portugal itself. The VIII Anniversary commemorations took place in October 2009, in East Providence, in the State of Rhode Island, USA. The seminar was undeniably a great success, having congregated a panel of illustrious speakers on a subject that is very pertinent to the peoples of the Portuguese Diaspora in the current global context: Reinvention and Innovation: Envisioning the Future in the Portuguese Diaspora.

In keeping with a policy of greater inclusiveness adopted in recent years, by which the Adiaspora.com project has sought to engage other Portuguese Communities in its many activities, as well as encourage their proximity to the mother-land, the IX Anniversary commemorations of the website were held in the town of Lajes do Pico, on Pico Island, Azores, on October 23 and 24, 2010. The choice of this paradisiacal insular Portuguese territory to host to the event was very pertinent when taking into account the fact that the people from this Island-Mountain, and those from the other Azorean islands and the Madeira Archipelago, have always been at the vanguard of the Portuguese migratory movement to the Americas and other parts of the globe. The programme presented at the seminar under the theme “Confluences of the Portuguese Spirit, and in which the Cape Verde islands were most ably represented by the Mayor of Sal, Dr. Jorge Figueiredo, aimed to converge the divergent and diverse vectors that make up the Lusitanian Universe through dialogue and intercommunity interactivity.

In keeping with our pluralistic ideology, this year Adiaspora.com aims to include the European sector of the Lusitanian diasporic movement by holding the X Anniversary celebrations of our website in the vibrant cosmopolitan British capital, the City of London, this coming November. With the theme “Insularities”, the seminar will explore the dynamics currently at play amongst Portuguese-speaking people that have chosen to settle and build their future in Great Britain. This insular territory has enjoyed historical ties with Portugal and the Portuguese since the very birth of our nation. These were consecrated later, in 1386, by the Treaty of Windsor, the oldest standing alliance in the world today.

With the logistic support of the Centro Desportivo Cultural Português in London, who have since the very first instance displayed goodwill and a collaborative spirit, the X Anniversary of Adiaspora.com, the website which seeks to promote our common Lusitanian heritage, will be held on the 26th and 27th November 2011 at the LOST Theatre, 208 Wandsworth Road, London  SW8 2JU, United Kingdom.

It is our hope that this event in London will energize the convergence of the synergies, dynamics and interests currently at work in the vast Lusitanian multiverse, and that the Portuguese Communities of Europe may come to play a more significant and reinforced role in the social interaction and dialogue taking place daily in the virtual pages of the Adiaspora.com website.

Finally, I wish to reassure you that the Adiaspora.com project will remain true to the mission laid out at its founding, that is, to promote Lusitanity in all its pluridimensionality! The features and articles we publish and the feedback resulting from our initiatives shall be the “compass” by which we guide our informative mission: laying down new directives, altering and adjusting our path whenever necessary or the Elysian winds of technological change so dictate. The only thing permanent is our will to disseminate and promote Lusitanity and Lusophony to the very best of our ability.
To this end, as always we count on your support and encouragement.